Conventional vending machines exist in a variety of locations. As an example, in a typical food court in a shopping mall, conventional vending machines exist as large upright freestanding devices that are often as tall as a grown adult (e.g. 6 feet tall) and that can weigh over one hundred pounds or more. In operation of a conventional vending machine, a customer approaches the machine and decides on an item that he or she would like to purchase from the machine (e.g. by viewing the items through a glass window). The customer then inserts money into the machine or swipes a credit card on a credit card reader of the machine. After all of the money is inserted into the machine or after credit card processing completes and authorizes the purchase, the customer is able to press a button or pull a lever to actuate a mechanism within the machine that causes the selected item to be dispensed from an opening on the front of the machine. The customer then reaches into the opening and retrieves the purchased item.
Owners of conventional vending machines employ a vending maintenance person who has the responsibility of periodically visiting the vending machine to determine the inventory of items contained in the machine (i.e. to determine if any items need to be restocked). The vending maintenance person typically has a daily route in which he or she visits numerous vending machines all day long, restocking each machine as needed along the route. The vending maintenance person often has a truck or van fully stocked with the various items that the vending machines on his or her route are capable of vending to customers. When the vending maintenance person arrives at a location of one or more vending machines, he or she typically retrieves a wheeled dolly or cart from the truck or van and places boxes of the items that the vending machines at that location can dispense onto the dolly or cart. The vending maintenance person then leaves the truck or van and takes the cart to the location of the vending machine (e.g. in a building). The maintenance person approaches the vending machine with the new stock of items on the cart and uses a key to unlock a door on the vending machine to inspect the inventory of the vending machine. If a particular type of item such as a candy bar has been vended numerous times to customers, the inventory of that candy bar will be low. In response, the vending maintenance person finds the corresponding type of candy bar in the boxes of new stock items on his or her cart, opens the box of items, retrieves a handful of items and inserts the new items one by one into the machine to replace the items that had been vended from the machine since the last time that vending maintenance person restocked the machine.
To vend each item, a typical conventional vending machine might include a spiral or corkscrew shaped motorized wire that can rotate one full turn in order to dispense a single item from the vending machine in response to a customer paying for that item. As more and more items are dispensed from the vending machine (in response to different customers purchasing those items), the spiral shaped wire will begin to have open spaces (one for each item vended) in between its spirals due to the purchase of those items. The vending maintenance person manually restocks each spiral for a given type of item (e.g. a certain type of candy bar) by placing individual items such as the candy bars within the open spaces of any unfilled spirals. When all items have been restocked in this manner, the vending maintenance person closes and locks the housing of the vending machine and moves on to the next machine on the route. This process is repeated periodically by the vending maintenance person on a daily or weekly basis depending upon how frequently items are purchased from the machine.